Hyaena Hall’s Mammoth Bones
Archived: 20 September 2026
Abstract
31,057 BCE is not a precisely recoverable Irish year but falls within the unstable Late Pleistocene MIS 3. Derryvree, County Fermanagh, preserves freshwater sediments between glacial tills, indicating locally ice-free, treeless tundra wetlands during a broad period encompassing this date. Castlepook Cave, County Cork, contains a disturbed but significant pre-Last Glacial Maximum fauna, including mammoth, reindeer, giant deer and spotted hyaena. A cut-marked reindeer femur may indicate brief human butchery around 31,000 BCE, yet no settlement is proven. Evidence supports a cold, changing landscape intermittently used by mammals and perhaps people, not political, social or chronological narratives at this scale.